Sunday, October 12, 2014

Wife in the Way: Female Serial Killers Who Eliminate a Wife to Marry a Husband

Fredegund is said
to have strangled the Queen Galswintha in order to marry the king and to have murdered her three stepsons. Because her first two sons died in infancy, she accused a number of women
of witch craft and had them tortured. She is also reputed to have ordered the assassination of
Sigebert I of Austrasia in 575 and also to have made attempts on the
lives of Sigebert's son Childebert II, her brother-in-law Guntram, king of
Burgundy, and Brunhilda (sister of Galswintha).

Catherine Shoemaker was a very pretty girl in the employ of
Mr. Sharp, a very wealthy citizen of Spencer County, Ky. Her mistress died –
with a bad taste in her mouth, This Catherine married the widower, and he only
arrived long enough to bequeath all his property to his young wife; when he
died – with a bad taste in his mouth. – One more husband was to died before the
black widow’s poisoning career was terminated.

“Brigitte seems to have been very fond of married life, but
unfortunate does not appear to have met with a husband entirely suited to her
tastes.” She murdered her first husband before the honeymoon was completed.
Number two was put out of the way a few months following nuptials. The
murderess ran into problems when, after murdering the wife of her latest
desired mate, a physician spotted the evidence of the poison homicide.”

The woman Nemesis who gave the police important information
regarding the deaths of nine persons that center mysteriously about Mrs. Louise
Vermilya, and that promise to form the greatest poisoning mystery in the
history of Chicago, was revealed today as Mrs. Minnie Mystock. She is employed
in a bakery at No. 2902 Cottage Grove avenue. Mrs. Mystock is said also to have
been interested in Bisonette, when Mrs. Vermilya said was her fiance.

Mrs. Demmer was investigated but not brought to trial. She
was suspected of five murders. She claimed the man she was the housekeeper for
(and “more”) had murdered his wife and later committed sucide. In any case, all
the corpses exhumed contained arsenic. One of the deaths was that of a woman
the soon-to-be-dead widower Mrs. Demmer was living with had been “paying too
much attention to.”

“A
young Japanese woman named Kaneko is being tried here on a charge of poisoning
18 people whose lives she had insured in her favour. Good-looking and
well-educated, she cleverly tricked both doctors and insurance companies. First
she murdered her sister, with whose husband she had fallen in love. Kaneko
asked him to meet her at a Geisha house, where he told her that he had grown
tired of his wife.”

African-American, 13 insurance murders, combining “Black
Widow,” “killer mom,” killer step-mom.” She killed the wife of a minister to
free him for marriage, then proceeded to murder him and the motherless
children. She murdered 3 husbands altogether.